Meditations for Emotional Healing: Finding Freedom in the Face of Difficulty

Despite our best intentions, we often have trouble dealing effectively with strong emotions. What if you had a conscious, skillful way to respond in times of anger, fear, jealousy, shame, and other powerful emotions? Meditations for Emotional Healing gives us a collection of insights and practices for bringing compassion, clarity, and understanding to our emotional lives-instead of expressing or repressing them in unhealthy ways.

Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha

"Believing that something is wrong with us is a deep and tenacious suffering," says Tara Brach at the start of this illuminating book. This suffering emerges in crippling self-judgments and conflicts in our relationships, in addictions and perfectionism, in loneliness and overwork - all the forces that keep our lives constricted and unfulfilled. Radical Acceptance offers a path to freedom, including the day-to-day practical guidance developed over Dr. Brach's 20 years of work with therapy clients and Buddhist students.

Amazing Grace 2: More Conversations About the Life of the Soul (To The Best of Our Knowledge)

This collection of powerful moments from a beloved public radio program tries to capture the essence of what matters most in life. With wisdom and compassion, humor and courage, respect and awe, celebrities and ordinary people share their best thinking about how to live and how to die. No matter what your spiritual orientation, these stories will enlighten and entertain you. And they'll dare you to keep an open mind.

Radical Self-Acceptance

According to Dr. Tara Brach, feelings of shame and unworthiness are the source of many problems we experience with our relationships, careers, creative endeavors, and most fundamentally, our spiritual unfolding. On Radical Self-Acceptance, this respected clinical psychologist and Buddhist meditation teacher shows you how to free yourself from the grip of your insecurities about being "good enough."

Finding True Refuge: Meditations for Difficult Times

When the difficulties and losses of life feel overwhelming, is there someplace we can turn for the safety, nurturing, and peace that we long for? Most of us are strongly conditioned to react with fear and confusion, falling back on strategies of judgment, control, addictive behaviors, and anger. Yet there is another way. “In any moment, no matter how lost we feel, we can take refuge in presence and love,” teaches Tara Brach.

True Refuge: Finding Peace and Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart

How do you cope when facing life-threatening illness, family conflict, faltering relationships, old trauma, obsessive thinking, overwhelming emotion, or inevitable loss? If you're like most people, chances are you react with fear and confusion, falling back on timeworn strategies: anger, self-judgment, and addictive behaviors. Though these old, conditioned attempts to control our life may offer fleeting relief, ultimately they leave us feeling isolated and mired in pain. There is another way.

Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation

Finding one's calling is not just about finding something we can do - it is about finding what we can't not do. "Let your life speak" is a time-honored Quaker admonition to live one's life as witness to the deepest truths one knows. But as Parker Palmer explains, those words can also mean "listen to your life, and let it tell you what your truth is."

When her granddaughter was accepted to Naropa University, the celebrated author Pema Chödrön promised that she'd speak at the commencement ceremony. Fail, Fail Again, Fail Better contains the wisdom shared on that day. "What do we do when life doesn't go the way we hoped?" begins Pema. "We say 'I'm a failure.'" But what if failing wasn't just "okay"... but the most direct way to becoming a more complete, loving, and fulfilled human being?

Healing the Core Wound of Unworthiness: The Gift of Redemptive Love

"So many of us hold a deep belief that we were born unworthy," reflects Adyashanti, "inadequate, unlovable, and alone." But what if, in truth, we weren't put here to pay penance, change our karma, or "fix" ourselves? What if we chose to be here because we so loved the world that we poured ourselves into it - to make it whole again, to restore "the hidden divinity amid the disaster"? With Healing the Core Wound of Unworthiness, we're invited to entertain that possibility.

Meditation and Psychotherapy: A Professional Training Course for Integrating Mindfulness into Clinical Practice

Healing is coming home to one's own authentic self - to the loving presence that is the ground of our being. But we often get trapped by the false refuges of fear-based habits and judgmental thoughts. Created for mental health professionals and illuminating to anyone interested in the core techniques, practices and insights of Buddhist psychology, this experience-focused audio-learning program helps us find our way back to natural presence, a place where peace and our deep love for life grows.

Science is now revealing how the flow of thoughts actually sculpts the brain. By combining breakthroughs in neuroscience with insights from thousands of years of contemplative practice, you, too, can use your mind to shape your brain for greater happiness, love, and wisdom.

A profound transformation can occur just by training your attention in awareness - a practice sweeping schools, workplaces, and institutions across the country with its capacity to decrease stress, cultivate inner calm, and expand wisdom and creativity. Clinical psychologist and meditation teacher Tara Brach has been at the forefront of mindfulness-based therapy since its inception, successfully bringing principles of mindfulness to alleviate depression, chronic pain, and more.

When Pain is the Doorway: Awakening in the Most Difficult Circumstances

What if the full sense of our aliveness were only to be found amidst our most challenging times and difficult experiences? In pain and crisis, teaches Pema Chödrön, there lies a hidden doorway to freedom that appears to us only when we're sure that there is no way out. In these intimate audio learning sessions, Pema Chödrön helps us distinguish the triggers or external events that we blame for our suffering from the deeper habitual patterns that feed our anger, fear, or sadness.

New Seeds of Contemplation

New Seeds of Comtemplation is one of Thomas Merton's most widely read and best loved books. Christians and non-Christians alike have joined in praising it as a notable successor in the meditative tradition of St. John of the Cross, the Cloud of Unknowing, and the medieval mystics, while others have compared Merton's reflections to those of Thoreau.

We humans tend to get in our own way time and time again - whether it comes to not speaking up for ourselves, going back to bad romantic partners, our umpteenth diet, or engaging in any of a range of bad habits we just can’t seem to shake. In Rewire, renowned psychotherapist Richard O’Connor, PhD, reveals why our bad habits die so hard. We have two brains - one a thoughtful, conscious, deliberative self, and the other an automatic self that does most of the work without our attention.

The Buddha Walks into a Bar...: A Guide to Life for a New Generation

This isn’t your grandmother’s book on meditation. It’s about integrating that “spiritual practice” thing into a life that includes beer, sex, and a boss who doesn’t understand you. It’s about making a difference in yourself and making a difference in your world - whether you’ve got everything figured out yet or not.

Talking to Crazy: How to Deal with the Irrational and Impossible People in Your Life

Let's face it: We all know people who are irrational. No matter how hard you try to reason with them, it never works. So what's the solution? How do you talk to someone who's out of control? What can you do with a boss who bullies, a spouse who yells, or a friend who frequently bursts into tears? In his book Just Listen, Mark Goulston shared his best-selling formula for getting through to the resistant people in your life. Now he brings his communication magic to the most difficult group of all - the downright irrational.

Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life

Lucidly and beautifully written, Peace Is Every Step contains commentaries, meditations, personal anecdotes, and stories from Nhat Hanh's experiences as a peace activist, teacher, and community leader. It begins where the listener already is - in the kitchen, office, driving a car, walking - and shows how deep meditative presence is available now.

Audible Editor Reviews

Every episode of To the Best of Our Knowledge revolves around a theme, so think of this as an uber-episode. It's a collection of the show's finest interviews, not so much on religion as on the nature of spirituality.

As is always the case with To the Best of Our Knowledge, the range of subjects is eclectic (and, in this case, ecumenical): life after death, atheism, meditation, grace. Each of the 13 interviews is a thoughtful gem. But what is especially striking is that each one focuses on the positive. This is not the place to hear heated, I-can-shout-louder-than-you debates on religion. It is the place to learn how novelists, poets, musicians, a rabbi, a nun, even an ex-con look outward and inward.

And there's something about host Jim Fleming, something about his voice that's both soothing and inquisitive, like he's hanging out in your kitchen having coffee and talking over a favorite book!

Publisher's Summary

This special To The Best of Our Knowledge collection contains 13 interviews:

Embracing Your Life: Tara Brach is a psychologist, Buddhist meditation teacher, and author of Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha.

The Gift of Silence: Parker Palmer is a Quaker writer, educator, activist, and author of Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation.

Alone in a Cave: Tenzin Palmo was one of the first Western women ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist nun.

Divine Music: Jazz singer Kurt Elling talks about reaching for the divine through his music.

In Praise of the Wild: Pattiann Rogers tells Jim Fleming that naming things is the way to notice and appreciate them.

This was a smorgasbord of fascinating interviews on a variety of "soul searching" topics. Fleming is an excellent interviewer - his voice is very pleasant without putting the listener to sleep, and the other interviewers are top rate too. I found myself wanting to explore more about these topics and the authors that were mentioned and I was sorry when the recording ended...so I listened again (something that I rarely do). This was a real pleasure to own!